It has been a few years since I last worked on and published an application, otherwise known as a Skill, for Alexa powered voice assistants. My last Skill titled, BART Control, was built out of necessity because of my commuting on the Bay Area Rapid Transit system. While I didn’t open source it, I had created the Skill with Node.js and a publicly available BART web service. Since then I had written a tutorial titled, Create an Amazon Alexa Skill Using Node.js and AWS Lambda, which also focused on Node.js.

I’m a huge fan of Golang and was pleased to see that AWS Lambda recently started to officially support it. AWS Lambda isn’t a requirement to creating Alexa Skills, but it is a huge convenience. To make things even better, Amazon recently sent me an invitation to take part in their developer offer to receive an Amazon Echo Show for publishing another Skill. The offer and Golang inspired me to develop another Skill and this time I wanted to share my process.

Recently I published my first skill for Amazon’s Alexa voice service called, BART Control. This skill used a variety of technologies and public APIs to become useful. In specific, I developed the skill with Node.js and the AWS Lambda service. However, what I mentioned is only a high level of what was done to make the Amazon Alexa skill possible. What must be done to get a functional skill that works on Amazon Alexa powered devices?

We’re going to see how to create a simple Amazon Alexa skill using Node.js and Lambda that works on various Alexa powered devices such as the Amazon Echo.